In Vitro Propagation of African Violets

Abstract

The African violet, Saintpaulia ionantha, is propagated vegetatively from leaf cuttings and is grown on a large scale commercially and on a small scale by many home gardeners (4). When one or more shoots are allowed to develop on a cutting during vegetative propagation, constrictions are imposed by the multiplicity of plantlets in a limited growing space, resulting in unsymmetrical plants with elongated sideways displaced petioles. Propagation by tissue culture overcomes this problem and results in a large number of well-formed single-stemmed plants from a given amount of leaf tissue.